Personal identification has numerous applications such as physical access control, computer security and law enforcement. Biometric based personal identification is regarded as an effective method for automatically recognizing a person's identity with a high confidence. Biometrics are physiological or behavioral characteristics used to distinguish between individuals which can serve as a superior solution to this problem. Many systems have been developed based on various biometric characteristics. Biometrics systems have been developed based on different kinds of biometrics, including face, iris, fingerprint, palm-print, voice and signature. Each biometric identifier has its own characteristics and application domains and none of them can supersede all the others under every circumstance. For example, although fingerprint identification has been widely used for many years and works well in most cases, it has its own drawbacks including difficulty to acquire fingerprint features. For some types of people, such as labor workers and the elderly, the inner parts of the hands can be easily abraded that will seriously affect the performance of fingerprint, palmprint, or finger basal creases based systems. Iris based systems can achieve extremely high accuracy, however, iris scanners are very expensive. Palm print based systems must have a large size acquisition device. As a result, new kinds of systems based on various biometric identifiers are still developing.
Therefore there is a desire for a biometric method and system that addresses some of the problems identified.